THE CENTER SQUARE—The pornography website Pornhub soon will be inaccessible in 13 states after lawmakers passed a flurry of restrictions for social media and other internet sites.
The bills require certain age-verification measures for websites hosting adult content.
A total of 16 states—Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Texas, Utah, and Virginia—approved legislation requiring pornographic websites to ask users to prove they are over 18 years old.
Each state’s legislation has unique provisions, but the overarching principle remains similar: Websites with material deemed “harmful to minors” must verify users’ ages through approved technology or databases.
Kansas, for instance, enacted a law effective July 1 mandating that websites where at least 25% of content is classified as “harmful to minors” implement age verification. Proponents argue these measures protect children. Florida’s HB 3 requires 33.3%.
“The harms that pornography cause to our Kansas kids compel us to create barriers for their access,” state Rep. Susan Humphries, R-Wichita, said in April, according to The Topeka-Capitol Journal.
Aylo, the Canadian parent company of Pornhub, reports attracting over 115 million daily visitors to its platforms, delivering more than 3 billion advertising impressions each day.
A recent press release from Pornhub revealed that users ages 18 to 24 accounted for the largest share of site traffic in 2023, making up 27% of total visits. The second-largest group was users ages 25 to 34, who comprised 24% of the platform’s traffic.
In an email to the news agency Florida Politics, Aylo wrote:
Unfortunately, the way many jurisdictions worldwide, including Florida, have chosen to implement age verification is ineffective, haphazard and dangerous. Any regulations that require hundreds of thousands of adult sites to collect significant amounts of highly sensitive personal information is putting user safety in jeopardy. Moreover, as experience has demonstrated, unless properly enforced, users will simply access non-compliant sites or find other methods of evading these laws.
In May, the social media platform X updated its policy to allow adult content.
“We believe that users should be able to create, distribute, and consume material related to sexual themes as long as it is consensually produced and distributed,” X writes. “Sexual expression, whether visual or written, can be a legitimate form of artistic expression.”
Prior to the change, research showed significant amounts of pornography encounters on the site, surpassing even the traffic of Pornhub.
Research in 2023 highlighted in the Australian eSafety Commissioner’s online road map for age-verification technology revealed that 41% of teens ages 16 to 18 reported encountering pornography on X, surpassing the 37% who accessed it on dedicated adult websites.
X does limit such content to 18 and older, but nothing stops a user from inflating his or her age. Further, there is no telling that X would pass the 33.3% age-verification threshold required in Florida or the 25% required in Kansas.
Another survey cited by eSafety found that Instagram was a source of online pornography for 33% of respondents, followed by TikTok at 23% and Reddit at 17%.
“Some 13+ online services allow pornography (for example, Discord, Reddit, and Twitter) while others do not (for example, Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, and TikTok),” eSafety writes. “Children report regularly seeing pornography across both services that do and do not allow it.”
Innumerable personal accounts also exist across platforms, many of which collaborate with aggregating accounts such as PornClubDaily, an X account that boasts nearly 500,000 followers and appears to collaborate with other aggregating accounts.
Critics of related legislation raise concerns over free speech.
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression argues that legislation imposes unconstitutional restrictions on both minors and adults.
“HB 3 eliminates free speech protections that Floridians, like all Americans, have long enjoyed,” FIRE said of the Florida legislation, adding that similar laws in other states have faced court injunctions.
Courts previously struck down comparable age-verification measures, citing the undue burden on adults’ access to protected speech.
FIRE also raised concerns about the erosion of online anonymity, warning that HB 3 could have far-reaching implications beyond Florida.
Originally published by The Center Square
